The specification relates to sharing user-generated content to external social networks. In particular, the specification relates to adding external social networks as contacts on a primary social network and sharing user-generated content to the external social networks from the primary social network.
Social network users are faced with many choices. They can create text and share links on social network applications such as microblogs, generate blog posts, interact on forums, etc. As the number of options increases, users dislike having to repost the same content on multiple websites. It is time consuming for a user to copy and paste the same content to different social networks every time the user wants to share with online social contacts. Existing social networks help users to overcome this problem by relying on external applications like browser extensions and third-party server side applications to post user-generated content to different social networks. This technique, however, has numerous drawbacks.
First, installing a browser extension or using a third-party server side application for each social network is a waste of resources and does not allow the granularity of sharing. Second, installing the application requires manual interaction to enable sharing to other social network accounts. For example, a browser extension that adds a button for a user to click to share a specific post from a primary social network to other social network accounts simultaneously requires that the button be clicked every time the post is shared. Thus, what is needed is a more efficient way to share user-generated content with external social network accounts without relying on external applications.